Here's a fun challenge: Notice where, how and with whom Give&Take is used compared with where, how and with whom Be-Do-Have is used, to notice where and how abuses exist.” -John Juster

I would also note, John, a point brought to my attention by either Ken Taylor or John Davies from a PhilosophyTalk podcast: that corporations are inherently sociopathic: they don’t care, they don’t feel, they’re completely lacking in empathy. In other words:

“It doesn’t feel!!! It can’t be human!!!!!!!”

:that is despite what the Citizen’s United ruling tells us. That said, what I mainly came back for was to articulate on your give/take dynamic in the context of a conceptual model I have been nurturing for some time: Efficiency or that which is maximized by minimizing the differential between the resources put into an act and the resources gotten out. And I present it as a Metaphysics of Efficiency that is opposed to the Metaphysics of Power (and the Culture of More that results (which has dominated our culture so far.

Now, given the window I have here, I’ll have to elaborate as we go along. But your point gives me an opportunity to apply it in your terms. (And I would also note that the concept has been haunting me throughout my immersion in Dworkin’s book.) It seems to me that your give and take dynamic pretty much represents the Metaphysics of Power in that such relationships always end up asymmetrical in that, as I said before, the “taking” part of it always seems more in the interest of the individual subject. The be/do/have dynamic, on the other hand, seems to support the Metaphysics of Efficiency in that is about an individual act that only takes in the resources it needs and, thereby, leaves resources available to other acts of be/do/have. Once again, I’ll have to explain as we go along. This is just the wide swashes.*Bounce 2 (in reference to discourse: https://www.facebook.com/groups/6757450 ... 0110161057):

“I think this may be a bias on the part of Marx. Much like the mistake he made regarding the market, he thought that the market was a capitalist phenomenon when it was in fact a phenomenon of any industrialized economy---though it wasn't his fault, there weren't any other industrialized economic systems to compare to. In this case I would argue that man to man alienation could appear under any political system where people were induced to compete. Feudal lords could induce it just as easily as evil managers.” –David A. Anderson

I would go deeper than that, David, in arguing that when it comes to Capitalism, there is nothing new under the sun. It pretty much comes down to what has always been the case: under whatever ideological system, there have always been a group of people who felt they were entitled to more than others, even if it came at the other’s expense.

This is why we always see common frameworks under the deceptions. As I like to joke:

It use to be pray hard and follow these principles, and you too may enter the kingdom of heaven.

Now it’s:

Work hard and follow these principles, and you too may enter the kingdom of success.*Anyway guys, there was so much more I wanted to get to here. I apologize for what I couldn’t.

Humble yourself or the world will do it for you -it was either Russell or Whitehead. I can't remember which.

When I was young, I use to think the world was a messed up place so i was pissed off a lot. But now that I'm older, I know it is. So I just don't worry about it. -John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten).

Anarchy through Capitalism -on a flyer thrown out during a Kottonmouth Kings concert.

First we read, then we write. -Emerson.

All poets are damned. But they are not blind. They see with the eyes of angels. -William Carlos Williams: in the introduction to Ginsberg's Howl.

You gotta love that moment when the work is done and all that is left to do is drink your beer and sip your jager and enjoy what you've done. It's why I do and love it.

I refuse to be taken seriously.

Once again: take care of your process and others will take care of theirs. No one needs a guru. Just someone to jam with.

Coming to the end of my immersion in Dworkin’s How Karl Marx Can Save American Capitalism as I am, I find myself coming to peace with him –that is with qualifications. As the section in the last chapter suggests, “The Future of American Conservatism”, Dworkin’s primary goal is to reform the conservative position (mainly that of the economic conservative (and take it (as well as the Republican party (back to the role it use to play: that of check and balance to progressive excesses. And we all have to agree that the left can be a little too idealistic and, thereby, excessive. For instance: the idea of open borders. Granted, in perfect world it would be nice; but in ours, it just wouldn’t be prudent –anymore than eliminating the powerful tool of Capitalism would.

I even agree with Dworkin’s concerns as concerns Marx’s 4th form of alienation (the one that emerged with advanced Capitalism): man against man. And he does provide an adequate survey of the results of that alienation –sometimes through narratives that, while plausible, are a little less than multidimensional.

(I sometimes found myself wishing he was as good a fiction writer as he was a theorist.)

Still, as a theorist, apparent conservative and true believer in the market, Dworkin at least tries to see and describe the very real effects of the market on individuals. And in this sense, he is not just offering the novelty of a FreeMarketFundamentalist being able to talk about Marx without expecting to hear psycho shrieks, but a reasonable approach that seeks to save Capitalism by addressing the needs of those it leaves out.

The problem is that he suggests that we need to address the psychological issues over the economic ones when the economic issues are the very source of the psychological ones. And how, exactly, do we legislate those psychological problems away? I mean this was Marx’s primary point –and even in the earlier books of Marx that Dworkin refers to and embraces. What Dworkin, to me, fails to see is that “man’s alienation to man” is inherent in the competitive nature of Capitalism, that whether it takes the form of advanced Capitalism or “Crony” Capitalism, it all comes down to same thing:

You simply cannot embrace an everyman for themselves (dog eat dog (ideology and ask “why?” when someone is holding a gun to your head and jacking your car. Likewise, nor can you expect profit seeking behaviors to look out for the best interests of everyone.

Humble yourself or the world will do it for you -it was either Russell or Whitehead. I can't remember which.

When I was young, I use to think the world was a messed up place so i was pissed off a lot. But now that I'm older, I know it is. So I just don't worry about it. -John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten).

Anarchy through Capitalism -on a flyer thrown out during a Kottonmouth Kings concert.

First we read, then we write. -Emerson.

All poets are damned. But they are not blind. They see with the eyes of angels. -William Carlos Williams: in the introduction to Ginsberg's Howl.

You gotta love that moment when the work is done and all that is left to do is drink your beer and sip your jager and enjoy what you've done. It's why I do and love it.

I refuse to be taken seriously.

Once again: take care of your process and others will take care of theirs. No one needs a guru. Just someone to jam with.

The deeper I go into Gibney’s book, A Generation of Sociopaths, the more I find to disagree with. Once again, I think he might have been better off noting the role sociopathy (which has always been inherent in America’s embrace of individualism (seems to be playing in the current political climate while noting the extent to which it seems to have accelerated under boomer dominance. As written, his condemnation of the boomer generation often comes off as one-sided to the point of compromising his otherwise articulate and comprehensive understanding of recent history. For instance, he accurately describes the important advances America made running from the New Deal to the 70’s: advances in social, racial, and economic justice as well as government financed advances in research, science, and technology and a major improvement in infrastructure. And I would also agree that a lot of it did get pissed away under the boomer’s watch.

At the same time, I think Gibney would benefit heavily from a reading of Robert Reich’s book on SuperCapitalism in which he points out that a lot of what occurred from the 80’s on was inevitable due to advances in technology. As Reich compellingly points out, what happened in the golden age that Gibney describes (or the not-so-golden age as Reich calls it: since it was mainly white males who were benefitting (will try to get to this later (was the result of the oligopolies that existed in those days. As anyone near or beyond my age remembers, those were days when most markets were dominated by one, two, at most three corporate entities. Cars, for instance, were dominated by Ford, Chrysler, and GM. TV was dominated by ABC, NBC, and CBS. And communications were dominated by Ma Bell. Under those circumstances, companies had the leeway to act as social ambassadors that could tolerate union demands, progressive taxes, and social safety nets.

But as technologies in transportation and communication advanced, these companies found themselves faced with increasing competition. And the corporation’s main reason to be is the satisfaction of the customer for the sake of its stockholders. There’s no way around that. We simply cannot expect corporations to act as moral agents. That is the job of government.

And given this, we can see that what Gibney attributes to the sociopathy of boomers may actually be the inevitable result of the inherent sociopathy of Capitalism –something Gibney conveniently dances around. And why wouldn’t he? Given his background as a lawyer, hedge fund manager, and venture capitalist?

Humble yourself or the world will do it for you -it was either Russell or Whitehead. I can't remember which.

When I was young, I use to think the world was a messed up place so i was pissed off a lot. But now that I'm older, I know it is. So I just don't worry about it. -John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten).

Anarchy through Capitalism -on a flyer thrown out during a Kottonmouth Kings concert.

First we read, then we write. -Emerson.

All poets are damned. But they are not blind. They see with the eyes of angels. -William Carlos Williams: in the introduction to Ginsberg's Howl.

You gotta love that moment when the work is done and all that is left to do is drink your beer and sip your jager and enjoy what you've done. It's why I do and love it.

I refuse to be taken seriously.

Once again: take care of your process and others will take care of theirs. No one needs a guru. Just someone to jam with.

“Even if we can no longer study large communities without TV, it is still at least possible to study differences between light and heavy viewers. These tests reveal a similar dynamic, “relatively strong negative correlations between viewing and achievement.” Reading comprehension and math performance all suffer when TV viewing is relatively heavy; children who watch a lot of TV are also more aggressive than light watchers (regardless of whether the programs themselves are especially violent). “ -Gibney, Bruce Cannon. A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America (p. 24). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.

Now it’s not like a lot research need be done here. The cause and effect relationship (the correlation (between TV watching and the lack of educational achievement is pretty easy to see: people who spend their time watching TV have less time to read or even think. This gets some shine from the Great Courses audio book I am presently listening to, The Terror of History: Mystics, Heretics, and Witches in the Western Tradition, in which Teofilo F. Ruiz points out that one of the preconditions for achieving the mystical experience is a willingness to not constantly fill one’s mental space with external distractions: TV, music, audio books in my case, etc.. And I think Ruiz’s point puts some shine on to how TV and other media can lead to the sociopathy of Gibney’s thesis –that is regardless of the actual violence of its content. But it gets more critical and timely when Gibney points out:

“It’s not that other generations don’t have their own issues with television, and the effects of newer media like immersive video games, smartphones, and Facebook will not be clear for some time. They are also beside the point for now, because it will be years before younger generations run the country. The unavoidable fact is that the nation is currently run by people who have a deep and unshakable relationship with TV, entranced from their beginnings by a medium with unambiguously negative effects on personality and accomplishment.” -ibid

What we have to note here is the effect of immediate gratification –that which Gibney associates with Boomer sociopathy, and which may well be being passed off onto their/our offspring. I, myself, have often written about my concern with the immediate gratification of instant publication, that which I find myself as seduced by as anyone else. And it seems to me that this can ultimately lead to a kind of narcissism. And how exactly do we distinguish narcissism from the sociopathy that Gibney describes?

Case in point: note the emergence of trolls, and how they evolved, as message boards became more popular –that, once again, which involves the immediate gratification of instant publication. The problem of Trolls, of course, has been greatly reduced by the FaceBook block which is complete as compared to the old message boards. But there still seems to be an element of sociopathy involved in that we are never engaging with the other as a whole, but rather a series of posts: objects that happen to occupy our computer screens.

Humble yourself or the world will do it for you -it was either Russell or Whitehead. I can't remember which.

When I was young, I use to think the world was a messed up place so i was pissed off a lot. But now that I'm older, I know it is. So I just don't worry about it. -John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten).

Anarchy through Capitalism -on a flyer thrown out during a Kottonmouth Kings concert.

First we read, then we write. -Emerson.

All poets are damned. But they are not blind. They see with the eyes of angels. -William Carlos Williams: in the introduction to Ginsberg's Howl.

You gotta love that moment when the work is done and all that is left to do is drink your beer and sip your jager and enjoy what you've done. It's why I do and love it.

I refuse to be taken seriously.

Once again: take care of your process and others will take care of theirs. No one needs a guru. Just someone to jam with.

“At heart, it was always and really about that license, whatever the official branding. Formally, the Love Pageant Rally of 1966 and subsequent “Human Be-In” had political goals, trying to unite in pursuit of a new age both the antiwar movement (whose elites viewed the hippies as too stoned) and the hippies (who considered the antiwar movement as too uptight and enmeshed in conventional politics). In practice, the culmination of this effort, 1967’ s Summer of Love, ended up less a synthesis of the various strands of Leftist political culture than a straight-up antithesis, standing against middle-class morality on matters of drugs and sex and for very little else.

“In keeping with the hedonic theme, many ostensibly political events were really more about drugs than demos. The Pageant’s date, October 6, 1966, was not the anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the Emancipation Proclamation, women’s suffrage, or anything too goody-goody or consistent with political platform. Rather, 10/ 6/ 66 was the day when LSD became illegal in California, an event to be protested, inevitably, by taking LSD. “ -Gibney, Bruce Cannon. A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America (p. 54). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.

Fair enough. There was a lot of hedonism at the heart of our protests and resistances in the 60’s and 70’s. Our issues with the war, the establishment, racial, gender, and economic equality, and whatever else we addressed were often used as justifications for our choice to do drugs and screw freely. We did as much with relativism in which we took an ethical issue to an ontological one that eventually resulted in the overreach of Richard Bach’s Illusions. But as we all know (and knew then), even a relativistic hippy knows better than to step in front of a moving bus –that was unless they were on Acid. The thing was: we really didn’t need to go to these extremes since it came down to an issue of engaging in activities that should have been matters of personal choice.

But I think Gibney’s background in law, hedge funds, and venture Capitalism becomes a liability, blind spot, and outright hypocrisy. The main problem is that for all his articulation, he still seems stuck in the tyranny of the functional disseminated for the sake of producer/consumer Capitalism: that which he clearly prospered from. This is why he dismisses the drug culture and sexual revolution with such venom. It is also why he addresses (articulately (the sociopathy inherent in Capitalism while conveniently dancing around the issue of Capitalism itself. Here he comes off like an alcoholic trying to convince themselves that if we engage in the same behavior in different ways, we’ll be able to continue with the vice involved without the consequences. In 12 step programs, they call that denial.

What this results in is Gibney failing to see the mixed package the 60’s and 70’s actually were. He fails, for instance, to see that regardless of what people were “doing it for”, it still managed to produce results. Advances in social justice were made. And they’re still being made (based on the spirit of the 60's (such as the advancement of LGTB rights and the legalization of marihuana –the use of which he condemns. He further fails to mention how many of those boomers, taking drugs in dorm rooms and riding on a government funded education, are now out there fighting the good fight for environmentalism and other causes such as the ACLU –many of which no longer do drugs. This is further why he (out of what feels like pop hipster cynicism (can dismiss Hillary Clinton as he does as an opportunistic ice queen while completely neglecting to note that she did attempt to get us the same healthcare system every other advanced nation has, only to be beat down by the sociopathy Gibney describes.

In fact, one has to wonder if Gibney doesn’t share the same sociopathic resistance to such a non-market healthcare system that might benefit the many at the expense of a certain group of people. Perhaps hedge fund managers and venture Capitalists?

Humble yourself or the world will do it for you -it was either Russell or Whitehead. I can't remember which.

When I was young, I use to think the world was a messed up place so i was pissed off a lot. But now that I'm older, I know it is. So I just don't worry about it. -John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten).

Anarchy through Capitalism -on a flyer thrown out during a Kottonmouth Kings concert.

First we read, then we write. -Emerson.

All poets are damned. But they are not blind. They see with the eyes of angels. -William Carlos Williams: in the introduction to Ginsberg's Howl.

You gotta love that moment when the work is done and all that is left to do is drink your beer and sip your jager and enjoy what you've done. It's why I do and love it.

I refuse to be taken seriously.

Once again: take care of your process and others will take care of theirs. No one needs a guru. Just someone to jam with.

"The conclusion is that while literature is still a category, it is an open category, not definable by fictionality, or by a disregard of propositional truth, or by a predominance of tropes and figures, but simply by what we decide to put into it. And the conclusion to that conclusion is that it is the reader who "makes" literature. This sounds like the rankest subjectivism, but it is qualified almost immediately when the reader is identified not as a free agent, making literature in any old way, but as a member of a community whose assumptions about literature determine the kind of attention he pays and thus the kind of literature "he" makes."

"Once the subject-object dichotomy was eliminated as the only framework within which critical debate could occur, problems that had once seemed so troublesome did not seem to be problems at all." -both from the intro to Stanley Fish's Is There a Text In This Class......

Here we see how the more esoteric theory of Deleuze and Guatarri (their rhizomatic model of machinic production (as well as the postmodern "death of the subject" (has managed to bleed into (or trickle down even (the more practical affair of literary criticism or even Rorty's pragmatic emphasis on discourse. I would start with the second point:

"Once the subject-object dichotomy was eliminated as the only framework within which critical debate could occur, problems that had once seemed so troublesome did not seem to be problems at all."

The problem Fish sees for the subject-object dichotomy is that it lies at the heart of more classicist approaches to interpretation that put too much emphasis on the text as a fixed object. This, consequently, leads to an assumption that the text has a fixed meaning that can be extracted if one has “the right tools”: tools, of course, that can only be had if one finds the “right expert”. And it isn’t hard to extract the meaning from the text of this particular argument: that understanding is vertical and hierarchal in nature. And we can see the overlap here with the general concerns of postmodern philosophy (within which I include poststructuralist theory). The subject-object dichotomy assumes some hierarchal subject that stands above the objects of the world with full authority to pass judgment upon them. The catch, however, is that we (as bodies (are all basically objects occupying space. This is the new sensibility’s primary grudge with such neo-classicist sensibilities such as scientism or the analytic. Their tendency to smugly dismiss more continental approaches only exacerbates the situation.

And one of the ways that the neo-classicists tend to dismiss more continental approaches is by pointing to subjectivism. But Fish sidesteps this by pointing to the role the interpretive community plays in it. He basically creates a model (that is if I am reading him right (in which there is a kind of de-centered feedback loop between the fixed nature of the text itself, the writer behind it, the reader (with all their psychological baggage), and the community within which they reach their conclusions or extract their meanings. This is why most of the meaning we extract from a work of art (much like our dreams (comes from the discourse that goes on around it. It’s why we, as readers, must see ourselves as nodes in a system of exchange very much like D & G’s rhizomatic matrix of machinic production and exchanges of energy (as well as Rorty’s pragmatic emphasis on unfettered discourse): it allows for a free flowing and creative exchange (in our finite capacity (with the infinite.

Humble yourself or the world will do it for you -it was either Russell or Whitehead. I can't remember which.

When I was young, I use to think the world was a messed up place so i was pissed off a lot. But now that I'm older, I know it is. So I just don't worry about it. -John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten).

Anarchy through Capitalism -on a flyer thrown out during a Kottonmouth Kings concert.

First we read, then we write. -Emerson.

All poets are damned. But they are not blind. They see with the eyes of angels. -William Carlos Williams: in the introduction to Ginsberg's Howl.

You gotta love that moment when the work is done and all that is left to do is drink your beer and sip your jager and enjoy what you've done. It's why I do and love it.

I refuse to be taken seriously.

Once again: take care of your process and others will take care of theirs. No one needs a guru. Just someone to jam with.

TJ? Greg? Still buzzing like a molecule in hot water here. Excellent stuff, guys! (And may the soul of Mark Twain rest in its grave over me engaging in the act of (my use of the exclamation mark (“laughing at my own joke”.) But that would seem to be imperative given that we are dealing with a complex issue based on a mixed package that has, of late, taken on a lot of political relevance. Greg gets at this in:

“It IS a high wire act we are engaged in and I suppose I am only suggesting we not get carried away in either direction and reminding that thought is meant to DO something in the world.So when Truth is attacked as the product of a self satisfied and increasingly static 'representational' epistemology I nod in agreement. But when the 'truth' of our best evidentially supported accounts are attacked (the Holocaust, climate change etc.) then I have a problem.”

And as far as I’m concerned, it will require a discourse just like this to not so much resolve the issue as get as close to resolving it as we can. And as Greg rightly points out, it is a high wire act. Plus that, I must confess that I am considering this issue for a future PN submission. So yeah, I am using you guys. Sue me when and if the article (for which I won’t get paid (gets published. That confessed, I want to start with a point made by T.J.:

“I want to defend enlightened empiricism while applying the right amount of postmodernism to keep it in check. I'm up on a high wire having a postmod panic attack. : ) Actually, I thought that Fish article we've been discussing does a pretty good job of showing the way to a proper balance.”

Not just Fish, but pragmatism in general –especially that of Rorty. Especially important here (the very cornerstone of it (is the role pragmatism played in James L. Christian’s philosophy textbook: The Art of Wondering. In it, he offers a dialectic between the truth test of correspondence (the equivalent of induction (and cohesion (the equivalent of deduction (and, finally, the synthesis of the pragmatic truth test: that which utilizes the advantage of both and more. In other words, whether we are using induction or deduction to prop up our arguments, it ultimately comes down to an argument that works –that seems sufficiently justified.

But the plot thickens. It’s not just a matter of what works. It is also a matter of who it is working for and why. And we see the import of it in Greg’s (or our shared (concern with holocaust and climate change denial.

And much as we see in Rorty’s pragmatism, I agree with TJ’s assertion:

“Actually, I thought that Fish article we've been discussing does a pretty good job of showing the way to a proper balance.”

Once again, I have yet to read the article. But my reading of Is There a Text in This Class certainly seems to prop up TJ’s understanding. In the book, Fish basically attempts to undermine Affective Fallacy argument which points to a tendency for the reader confuse the affect of the text with the text itself. This, basically, was an attempt on the part of neo-classicists to establish that the meaning of a text was somehow fixed, that it took an EXPERT to extract that meaning that we were obligated to accept. But Fish brings the reader back into it (democratizes it (by arguing that the text only creates meaning through its relationship with the reader. And William Carlos Williams props this up with his argument that a poem is basically a machine with words: a machine that basically produces an effect on the reader.

Of course, the argument against this would be that Fish opens us to the outright relativism (if not outright nihilism (of allowing every individual to have their own interpretation of the text. But that argument would be wrong. Fish makes a chess-like move in checking this argument by pointing to the feedback-loop between the fact of the text, the writer who wrote it, the reader, and the interpretive community within which it all exists. He basically resorts to the same pragmatic fallback as every other PoMo warrior: intersubjectivity.

Humble yourself or the world will do it for you -it was either Russell or Whitehead. I can't remember which.

When I was young, I use to think the world was a messed up place so i was pissed off a lot. But now that I'm older, I know it is. So I just don't worry about it. -John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten).

Anarchy through Capitalism -on a flyer thrown out during a Kottonmouth Kings concert.

First we read, then we write. -Emerson.

All poets are damned. But they are not blind. They see with the eyes of angels. -William Carlos Williams: in the introduction to Ginsberg's Howl.

You gotta love that moment when the work is done and all that is left to do is drink your beer and sip your jager and enjoy what you've done. It's why I do and love it.

I refuse to be taken seriously.

Once again: take care of your process and others will take care of theirs. No one needs a guru. Just someone to jam with.

"Levi-Strauss, like most neuro-biologists, rejects the mind/body dualism (inherited from Descartes) that has dominated so much of Western thought. He sees mind and body as functioning together as a single "eco-system". - from Introducing Levi-Strauss and Structural Anthropology, a graphic guide (and you can quit that snickering now, snob!)

Here again, we find ourselves in the overlap of postmodern/poststructuralist thought: that which helps us better understand Deleuze (that goddamn Frenchman (w/ and w/out Guatarri (which is the result of the French having perfected the art of dissent –having had the long history of doing so. And we can see its influence in the Anglo-American form of Rorty and the pragmatic approach: that is via discourse.

The main revelation at work is the materialism that I will qualify below as conditional. The cool thing for me, however, is how that materialism undermines the guru complex, that which my process is pretty much committed to doing. The humbleness and humility I am looking for is all too obvious in the words of Levi-Strauss:

"I don't have the feeling that I write my books. I have the feeling that my books get written through me and that once they have got across me I feel empty and nothing is left... I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no "I", no "me". Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. There is no choice, it is just a matter of chance." -Claude Levi-Strauss from a Canadian Broadcasting Company interview (1977)

Here we abandon the old notion of the lone genius (the guru (and see ourselves (as the intellectually and creatively curious: the ambitious (as nodes in a system. At the same time, I would argue that the embrace of materialism (for me at least (is conditional in that there is still room in this system for not so much Free Will as participation.

It seems to me that much of this comes out of our evolutionary process which has involved a non-linear feedback loop between the body, the brain, and the environment it is always negotiating. And in this feedback loop, we can see a possibility for participation in that which lies at some ineffable point between the determined and the random.

Humble yourself or the world will do it for you -it was either Russell or Whitehead. I can't remember which.

When I was young, I use to think the world was a messed up place so i was pissed off a lot. But now that I'm older, I know it is. So I just don't worry about it. -John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotten).

Anarchy through Capitalism -on a flyer thrown out during a Kottonmouth Kings concert.

First we read, then we write. -Emerson.

All poets are damned. But they are not blind. They see with the eyes of angels. -William Carlos Williams: in the introduction to Ginsberg's Howl.

You gotta love that moment when the work is done and all that is left to do is drink your beer and sip your jager and enjoy what you've done. It's why I do and love it.

I refuse to be taken seriously.

Once again: take care of your process and others will take care of theirs. No one needs a guru. Just someone to jam with.